One little-noted aspect of the Facebook IPO: Chairman and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg appears to have taken great pains to ensure that his management reign is secure. The shares issued to the public will have limited voting rights. And the company’s board, according to the prospectus, already has hired a compensation consultant.

That move, unusual among companies so young, is likely to ensure that Facebook’s executives will be amply paid. According to the search function in Adobe Acrobat, the word “compensation” appears 366 times in Facebook’s 201-page prospectus – not much less frequently than the word “Facebook” itself at 458 times. (The word “users” shows up 344 times; “stockholders,” 191 times.)

Of course, many great entrepreneurial leaders turned out to be good managers of their companies even after they matured; just think Bill Gates or Steve Jobs. On the other hand, for every such example, there are counter-examples as well; think Jerry Yang of Yahoo or Mike Laziridis of Research in Motion, who may have long overstayed their welcome, according to many analysts.

That’s precisely why evaluating talent is the hardest chore in investing. The great entrepreneur founder of a company isn’t always the right person to manage the challenges of slowing growth, rising competition and customers looking for the next new thing.

Thus, some analysts are troubled by the apparent steps that Facebook’s management has already taken, before the IPO, to entrench itself.

“You’re buying [Mr. Zuckerberg’s] stewardship for as long as he chooses to run the company, and that might be too long,” says Aswath Damodaran, a finance professor at New York University and author of several books on how to analyze the intrinsic value of companies. “To justify the price, you have to assume the management will always be managed to perfection. And I like what [Mr. Zuckerberg] has done so far, but I’m not willing to put my faith in him for perpetuity.”

As is customary among companies that have filed to sell shares to the public for the first time, a spokesman for Facebook declined to comment.